Styles: Freak-folk, american primitive guitar, post-rock, instrumental, acoustic improvSimilarities: The spiritual lyricism of Ben Chazny mixed with the stark brutalism of M.Gira. James Blackwell camping in a lo-fi cave. A doomcore John Fahey.

Decay/Swarmsis comprised of two guitar compositions recorded in single long takes. Both pieces are in an alternate tuning, and both explore various finger-picking patterns and musical styles, documenting durational guitar playing that changes speed and mood as the player cycles through emotion, fatigue, silence, tactile intimacy, and sudden improvisation.

The second piece, “Swarms” is dedicated to the late Ana-Maria Avram. It is inspired by her music, and in its later moments reinterprets her composition “Swarms for string orchestra”.

This year we released Eiyn Sof‘s acid-folk tour de force Meadow Thrum on CD. It quickly sold out and we were pretty happy about that. But over the following months the nagging feeling that the album is too good to not be in print got to be overwhelming. Thus this new deluxe reissue was born. Limited to 50 copies, it comes in a special printed envelope with a full colour insert card.

“… an album pitched equidistant from full-out folk and mind-melting psychedelia. Meadow Thrum is a consistently riveting, occasionally confounding collection of escapist sounds and musical textures. File Meadow Thrum next to the most verdant and lush folk records or the most transcendent of alternative records in your collection; Eiyn Sof sits comfortably in both worlds.” ~ Dominionated

At 6:28 AM (EST) on the 20th of March, the Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere for 2017, we’re releasing Meadow Thrumby acid-folk practitioners Eiyn Sof. The creation of Melissa Boraski, Eiyn Sof delves deep into the mushroom laden undergrowth of mystical forests of the mind.

As a teen Boraski sang contemporary gospel in charismatic evangelical church before defecting from church and faith to the Toronto music scene in her early 20’s. The birth of a child in 2008 prompted recording at home and self-releasing on the Springskull label. She released Bloodstreams on Rick White’s Blue Fog label in 2011. The albums Black Thread, Louise L’Amour/Cowgirl Slop Pop, Nightrifting followed on Springskull in the following years. And the autoharp-based Chthonic Tongue was released on Ur Audio Visual in 2015. All recordings, including Meadow Thrum, are primarily solo with the exception of the occasional guest. The Eiyn Sof live formation has morphed constantly since 2008.

Boraski on Meadow Thrum:
“It’s a murmuring attempt at animating an imagined landscape, and all manner of anthropomorphic entity within. I’ve been thinking of this album as druidic lore-play; it’s some pretty decadent fantasy. Hyper visual and hyper surrealistic, as far as lyrics are concerned. Threading in a lot of ’irreverent’ and intentionally loose percussive and organic sounds among more careful and familiar melodic stuff, which is gently reflective, I think, of the overarching concept and heart of the thing: play between two worlds. Above/below.

Uvesen is a Norwegian duo of percussionist Børre Myklebust and the highly prolific Andreas Brandal who has been releasing challenging and transcendental music since 1994, racking up hundreds of releases over several projects. With Uvesen the two embark upon free-improv psych experimentation of the highest order. Deep majick drones and wild aural landscapes. Abstract, percussive textures and bowed strings mingle with wild freak-folk dances and expansive electric guitar.

This music is such a beast we had to encase it in plaster for your safety.

They say everything’s bigger in Texas. That includes the mind-expanding tones coming out of out of Silent Land Time Machine’s epic looped violin compositions that weave and drone like tumbleweeds on crack’d black asphalt. Good sounds from bad lands. “Many Many Happy Returns” recorded LIVE at Marigold Studios (R.I.P.) in London, ON “The Contours Of Perfect Distance” recorded LIVE at Le Cagibi, in Montréal, QC, with additional amenities provided by Khôra & Nick Kuepfer.

BIO: SLTM; an inadvertent aural accumulator; a fractured signal; a concerted, compassionate memory resistor; the IN/OUT of an organic circuit experiencing itself for the first time; a starry-eyed-bliss-transformer; nerves attaching, detaching, strengthening, and severing; aimed at the clearing of neural circuitry with the frequency of white wind.

Moonwood guitarist, Jakob Rehlinger, works through six electric and acoustic solo guitar improvisations trying to get somewhere in the Easts (Far- and Middle-) while remaining rooted in the Americas. Lyrical, soaring airs played over dark, oily drones. Recorded direct to 2-track live in Moonwood’s rehearsal studio between Nov 2011 and May 2012.

BIO: Moonwood is the psych-improv project of Toronto (ON) guitarist Jakob Rehlinger, often joined by Jacqueline Noire on percussion, vocals and woodwinds. Solo or as a duo, Moonwood’s music is informed by (while not necessarily adhering to the traditions of) Tibetan funeral chants, krautrock, Balinese gamelan, classic psychedelic rock, traditional Japanese and South Asian music, dub, free-jazz and the usual grab-bag of avant-folk styles

Side 11—Nick Kuepfer, Tape Test For A New Year / Audrey’s Asprin / Grackles: Grinding string harmonies drone from the celestial abyss. Birds sing, forests crumble. A ghost trains thunders across the prairies, hammers on tin roofs as it passes. Somewhere to the south, a bank robber dies in the tumbleweeds, clutching a satchel full of money with a dusty hand. An entrancing, cinematic soundscape; a travelogue of the spaces between light and shadow.

BIO:Montreal-based guitarist Nick Kuepfer weaves nylon string and electric guitar pieces with live-sampled tape loops, recordings of animals, and drones from various sources. His predominantly wordless music ranges from subtle and static to frantic and abrasive, with a methodical, vigilant sense of experimentation guided by the search for consonance and dissonance with the sounds of “nature”.

Side 12—Khôra, Foris: Ringing in the shadows of a European cathedral, tones weave behind a camel train on the spice road and twist like smoke beyond the bazaars of Turkey before erupting like an Icelandic volcano, black ash on white snow.

BIO:Matthew Ramolo’s Khôra project is based chiefly on acoustic/electric guitar and field recordings, with extensive signal processing and digital interventions conditioning these sources to create an immersive soundworld of drones, chimes, rings and other pointillistic sonics. His longform compositions contain lovely stretches of relatively unprocessed and fully recognisable guitar work, with picking patterns and chord sequences that evolve/devolve into more signal-bent and DSP soundscapes. The results are highly organic and meditative while retaining plenty of icy shards, bubbling distortions and passages of controlled monumentalism, making this anything but an ambient listen.